The Developer Launchpad facilitates the onboarding process for the Rize ecosystem.
Year
2022
Role
UX/UI
Background
Rize is a financial platform provider with the goal to make financial services simple and accessible. To do this, Rize enables companies to build across multiple account types with one API. The developer launchpad replicates the Rize production environment and gives developers a no-cost, no-risk way to code, test, simulate, and troubleshoot before going live.
The product Rize offers has many moving parts which made onboarding clients to the platform a complicated manual process. The developer launchpad feature was introduced to facilitate the onboarding process and give prospective clients a peek into Rize’s products.
As the lead designer of this initiative:
• I used different discovery methods to define requirements.
• Evaluated my iterations with stakeholders to identify other areas of future growth.
• In the end, delivered a valuable experience for the user.
Smooth Sign Up
The first part of this project was creating a smooth onboarding funnel from the marketing site (front-end) to the launchpad (back-end). The Rize back-end storage infrastructure was divided from the front-end which complicated the funnel. I created a service blueprint to facilitate stakeholder decision-making and helped bridge the gap between these two worlds. The onboarding flow UI was designed to match the marketing site while including elements of the admin system as a foreshadowing effect.
Entirely Self-Serve
Rize offers a deeply intricate product, which, without the the developer lauchpad, required a lot of time and financial commitment when onboarding a client. The developer launchpad now allows clients to independently build and test the product without any roadblocks. It provides clear access to documentation, guides, SDKs, CLIs, and other tools to create a successful and autonomous experience for developers.
Developer Tools
The message queue console and simulations are the most commonly used tools within the developer launchpad.
The Rize message queue is used to communicate with the clients’ systems. It sends real-time notifications when significant events occur in the program. The message queue console (MQC) is a feature that allows users to review and interact with their current code in a live feed. Data gathered from several user interviews further underscored the significance of the MQC: we understood the console would give us a competitive advantage by facilitating the troubleshooting experience.
Simulations gave the user the option to make complex changes to their environment without any code. We were able to provide an experience where the user only needed to click 2 buttons to run a custom simulation to test their program.
Step 1: Discover
The first step of the project was to gather as much information as possible through market research and exploratory interviews. I performed a competitive analysis of 5 competitors’ platforms to evaluate their features, methods, target audience, and value proposition. The interviews were mainly focused on past user experiences in sandboxes. I was looking for pain points, must-have features, and a brief brainstorm on what Rize’s should look like.
Step 2: Define & Develop
The information gathered from the discovery phase allowed me to establish the requirements and open the conversation to the stakeholders. I presented a proposed feature list (organized in hierarchical order based on the competitive analysis and exploratory interviews with the stakeholders). Next I built interactive prototypes using InVision in order to perform a UX study with internal engineers. Insights and feedback were gathered during the testing process to validate the prototypes. Testing also brought to light new features that were put on a future sprint to be tested/researched further.
Step 3: Delivery
Once the stakeholders approved the final designs, the high-resolution scenes were created, documented, and put on Zeplin for front-end engineers to develop. After the buildout was complete, the developer launchpad went live allowing us to continue to gather client data for future revisions and new features.
The Developer Launchpad was the first time Rize opened their doors to the public. It facilitated the onboarding flow for current and future clients, gave prospective clients a way to evaluate the API, and gave long-time users new dev tools.